Portable electronic devices including navigation devices are becoming increasingly more popular. As the popularity of portable electronic devices has increased, manufacturers have responded by developing cross-functional devices to provide multiple functions. Thus, enhanced electronic devices may be configured to provide a wide range of functions and applications, only some of which are location-oriented. For instance, an electronic device may provide a combination of position-determining functionality, mobile phone service, Internet capability and so on. Further, an electronic device may be configured to utilize more than one position-determining technique to determine its geographic locations. When used for various activities, portable electronic devices may use hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to send and receive messages.
Due to the limited resources (bandwidth, processing power, battery life, etc) of some electronic devices, compression that reduces the size of the messages may be employed by the devices to manage and preserve the resources. Traditional compression techniques involve applying compression to the body of a message while leaving the header of the message intact. For messages containing a substantial amount of information in the header, though, traditional techniques that compress the body alone may not achieve a sufficient reduction in the size of the messages.